2013 Award Winner Atlee Webber

Meet Your Farmworker

We’re very excited to share a new documentary made by 2013 SAF Petrow-Freeman documentary award recipient Atlee Webber. Atlee was an Into the Fields intern in 2012, working with South Carolina Legal Services conducting outreach to migrant camps to promote access to legal services for farmworkers. After the summer ended, she started working full-time as an outreach worker and paralegal at SCLS. “As I have been working and living in South Carolina, I have noticed the local food movement really taking off,” Atlee says. “Whereas many of us who work with farmworkers would consider migrants' rights an inherent part of the local food movement, they continue to be overlooked. I decided to apply to the Petrow-Freeman Documentary Award to create a short documentary on why and how this discrepancy has developed.”

About the film:

All around the country, the local food movement has been spreading. The trend has popularized buying from smaller, local farms and supporting organic growing practices. Amidst the clamor for fresh, local produce, the people who actually harvest the food and the conditions they work under are rarely mentioned. Through interviews with advocates, farmworkers, and people in the local food industry, this short documentary explores why this disparity exists and why consumers should care about farm labor issues.